What a start to 2023! There’s been ex-cyclone Hale ravaging the East Coast of the North Island in mid-January, the weather dump flooding Auckland later that month, cyclone Gabrielle wreaking havoc in Hawkes Bay and elsewhere two weeks later, and in between, on a massively vaster scale, a horrific earthquake laying waste to a large swath of Turkey and Syria.

How could this relentless string of death, suffering, disruption and loss not jolt the faith of those who put their faith in a loving God in control of the universe?

Similar questions were raised after an even greater catastrophe, the Christmas tsunami in Thailand in 2004. Headlines around the world asked: ‘How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?’ “Where was God in this disaster?”, “Is God to blame for this?”, “Eco-disaster or God’s wrath?” And the anguished cry of a mother: “Why did the Almighty take my daughter away? What sin did I commit?”

It is happening again in Turkey and Syria. The questions are pertinent to people of all faiths. How to respond?

Let’s first clear away some of the standard explanations as unworthy of the Christian God, even though there are Christians who persist in putting them forward.

● God sent the earthquake and floods to remind the world that he still holds ultimate power in creation and over life and death. The corollary is that, being almighty, he could have prevented the disaster if he had a mind to. But he chose not to. For many people, this idea of an all-powerful God who intervenes from time to time to destroy thousands of lives while mercifully sparing others is wearing pretty thin – and so it should, when you tally the devastation wrought by natural disasters, disease and famine within our lifetime. As Christmas should have reminded us, the Christian God is embedded irrevocably in humanity, and the face of that God is love.

● God wanted to punish the wicked. After the Christmas tsunami this perversion of faith was seen at its most hideous in a statement by a Baptist church in Kansas rejoicing at the disaster for killing thousands of Swedes. A Swedish Pentecostal pastor had been jailed for inciting hatred against homosexuals, and the church in Topeka gloated at the tsunami as God’s revenge. How about that for a visceral projection of human hatred!

Similarly with the Turkish disaster, a leading Israeli rabbi, Safed Shmuel Eliyahu, judged that the earthquake that killed more than 38,000 men, women and children, was “divine justice”. He drew a parallel with the drowning of Egyptians in the Red Sea when Moses led his people to liberation: the Israelites did not try to save them but sang songs rejoicing that God had punished the Egyptians in this way. Revenge, the rabbi said, would come to all the nations around Israel that had harmed its people.

This appalled other prominent rabbis. One said he was deeply troubled by “the thought that the entire world is in tears amid the terrible sights in Turkey, and we, the people who brought to the world the tidings that every person is created in God’s image, should rejoice over those horrors?”

Another rejected Eliyahu’s comments: “Thousands of people made in God’s image are buried beneath the ruins of their homes, elderly and infants expiring in terrible agony, and we should view this as being to our benefit?” Such sentiments were way out of line with the teachings of the Torah, he said.

● God the creator set in place laws of nature, and they must take their course. So earthquakes and floods and tsunamis happen as part of a divine plan, which it is not for mortals to question. If scores of thousands perish in the process, that is unfortunate, but God would take care of them in another life.

To find this consoling, we would have to set aside our day-to-day understanding that finds sufficient evidence of cause and effect within the world as we know it, without any need to assume a supernatural origin from beyond. Atheists must meanwhile be tempted to see the wave of devastation as vindicating their rejection of God. If God is real and wreaks destruction on this scale, they might say, they want no truck with him.

If faith is to have any integrity in the modern world, it is necessary to move beyond these caricatures of religious faith to “another way of seeing”. I shall suggest such an approach next time.